The Femur is Lava

 

So I’ve been thinking about the time I went to PT and they discovered that one of my legs was shorter than the other. I went to PT because I had unbearable spasms in my back, but now I’m wondering if that wasn’t the start of my current problem with my hip. If you are so inclined, you can read about that little adventure here.

 

The timeline fits. My doctors say from that judging by my imaging they believe this has been going on for 5 or 6 years. I went to the ER and to PT in 2016. It’s just odd to me that in all this time I never had my hip bother me, not even a little bit. I know the doctors say that hips are fine until they are not. That hips can go from zero to 100 seemingly overnight. It’s just that you would think I would have felt even a little ache in my hip if I’ve had degenerative arthritis as long as they think I have.

 

Then again, we (all the medical professionals I saw, plus myself) treated my current hip thing as an MS flare for how many months? Who knows how many twinges and aches I attributed to MS through the years that were possibly something else? One of the joys* of having MS- even after 17+ years being diagnosed with MS- is that I’m still unsure what is a flare, what is a new symptom, and what is totally unrelated to MS. I’m not one to call the doctor with every little thing, but in this case, all the medical professionals in my life initially thought it was nerve inflammation, perhaps or perhaps not related to or caused by MS.

 

Could I have gotten help for my hip sooner? Maybe, if I had pushed for x-rays. The trouble in my case (I don’t know if this is true for all hip problem cases or not, so as usual, I will only explain how it affected me) was that the pain wasn’t in my hip exactly. The pain was all around my hip, but not where I would consider a hip problem to be. All the nerve pain diagnoses really fit the circumstances. Especially because it came out of nowhere, I never expected anything different than an MS flare. Apparently, no one else did either.

 

There was one symptom I had that was insane- the only way I could describe it is that it felt like the bone marrow in my femur was replaced with lava. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could touch that pain. It was burning, searing, pervasive, mind-numbing, and continuous. In my last post, you might remember that I casually mentioned I went for acupuncture. Well, I mentioned the lava-in-the-femur thing to this doctor of Chinese Medicine. Are you ready for this? I thought he was joking when he said there is something called “Steaming Bone Disorder”. HUH?

 

Well, me being me, what do YOU think I did when I got home? Yep, I contacted my good friend Google and read about Steaming Bone Disorder, which is caused by a Yin deficiency. I went down the rabbit hole but found a Chinese herbal supplement that was supposed to help. My doctor of Chinese medicine had some and I decided to try it. I would say within a week, the femur filled with lava thing was under control.

I am not suggesting you try this, or even that you see a doctor of Chinese Medicine. I’m only saying that it helped my femurs full of lava.

 

What I am saying, and I cannot say this enough, is NEVER stop advocating for yourself. If you know something is amiss, keep looking for a reason. I mentioned the femur-lava thing to each medical professional, and only the doctor of Chinese Medicine addressed it.

 

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